I began my journey in the field of Organization Development (OD) as a 21-year old, first-year PhD student in Organizational Psychology in the fall or 1972 at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I can only say that I was young and naïve. I refer to myself as young because I was only 21; naïve because my professors and mentors were the "Giants" in the field of OD and I had no clue. I was studying with such gurus as Bob Kahn, Dan Katz, Basil Georgopoulos, Bob Kaplan, Stan Seashore, Dave Bowers, Ron Lippitt, and others too numerous to name. I had no idea that I had the wisdom of some of the founding fathers at my disposal. I also would later meet and become a partner with Kathy Dannemiller, another giant in OD. What I did realize was that the field of OD was a fascinating, new, important and effective application of human behavior principles that I had been studying as an undergraduate. The difference was that this approach applied these principles to human behavior in groups or in entire organizations. I knew that t his new approach would shape the rest of my life in ways that I could not yet imagine.

There is a widespread phenomenon among people that causes them to believe they are above average in most areas. If you asked 100 people if they are great drivers, 95 percent will tell you they are, but traffic accident reports beg to differ. It is simply impossible for the majority of people to be exceptionally good at a particular behavior.

In my line of work, this attitude is particularly prevalent in workplace coaching. If you ask 100 managers if they are good coaches, the number may be slightly lower than 95 percent, but not by much. Managers assume that if they are good managers, being a good coach will naturally follow.

A few years ago our firm, Destiny Solutions, surveyed 200 companies across North America to find out about their continuing education preferences. What we found was almost all these employers had a system in place to financially support continuing education for their staffers, but only 16 percent felt the programs available were adequate for their needs, and only 9 percent had established a partnership with a college or university.

But now savvy higher-ed institutions are tailoring existing programs to address the needs of corporate clients. Call it customized education or just-in-time learning. I call it brilliant.

Truly effective enterprise collaboration applications represent one of the most promising opportunities for cloud computing. Over the last decade, several SaaS companies have emerged that improve workplace collaboration, including well-known companies like Box and Yammer, as well as newer companies such as Quip, Cotap, Hall and Slack.

Given my board roles with several of these companies, I am often asked about what is working and what is next. I want to share my thoughts on the promise and the progress in collaboration software while also touching on the areas of opportunity or the pain.

Introverts at Work: Designing Spaces for People Who hate Open-Plan Offices

Belinda Lanks, Bloomberg Business Week

Take a moment to get up from your desk, if you aren't already standing, and have a look around. If you see rows of desks, you're in an open-plan office. And if you're an introvert - one of those quiet, retiring types - you're stuck in the ninth circle of hell. Most employers opt for open spaces in the name of collaboration and creative thinking, in spite of recent studies suggesting that the setup generates more energy-sapping distractions than electrifying ideas.

There is a widespread phenomenon among people that causes them to believe they are above average in most areas. If you asked 100 people if they are great drivers, 95 percent will tell you they are, but traffic accident reports beg to differ. It is simply impossible for the majority of people to be exceptionally good at a particular behavior.

In my line of work, this attitude is particularly prevalent in workplace coaching. If you ask 100 managers if they are good coaches, the number may be slightly lower than 95 percent, but not by much. Managers assume that if they are good managers, being a good coach will naturally follow.

What's the best way to create tomorrow's business leaders? Companies in the United States spend an estimated $10.3 billion on leadership development, most of it on a combination of education, training, mentoring and networking. Many companies also run loose career-development programs that rotate executives through trial-by-fire assignments in different functions, business units and geographical markets.

Yet researchers and executives alike are realizing that such programs aren't enough. Training, education and coaching can't reproduce actual on-the-job conditions. And most on-the-job rotations lack the kind of oversight and rigor needed to ensure that executives get the most out of them. At many organizations, those rotations are still merely a box that rising managers need to check on the way up.

There's an elephant in the room when it comes to "innovation." And it's an ironic elephant given that we're all so hooked on data analytics, a/b testing, and getting metrics for anything and everything. Yet we all throw around terms like creativity, breakthroughs and disruptive innovation.

Companies eat up this stuff - they're fully on board. Innovation is going to shape the future. Sure - if we track and shape it.

According to McKinsey, more than 70 percent of corporate leaders tout innovation as a top three business priority, but only 22 percent set innovation performance metrics.

When Google disclosed its workforce diversity numbers late last month, it got plenty of attention. The decision to go public with the data was surprising: according to Calvert Investment's report, Examining the Cracks in the Ceiling, only 7 percent of the S&P 100 provide full disclosure. However, the numbers themselves, while disappointing, were about what one might expect.

Google reported that only 30 percent of its workers were female. While most companies don't provide full workforce numbers, 56 percent of the S&P 100 have no women or minorities in their highest-paid senior executive positions. Women make up only 19 percent of board of director positions, and only 37 companies have minority women on their board.

I recently oversaw a study designed to clarify the relationship between pivotal decisions and leadership. Based on our nationwide survey of 500 college-educated adults in professional careers, representative of 16 percent of adults in the United States, we uncovered four distinct decision-making styles, all defined by the level of accountability and ingenuity employed.